Although humans, as a race, have been around for 200,000 years, most of the Earth is still shrouded in mystery. Our oceans have vast areas that are still untouched, there are miles of unexplored landscapes, and even new animal species are discovered on a regular basis. However, while man conquers more of the planet, there are some happenings around the world that may never be explained. These are just three mysterious sounds that are still, well, mysterious:
Julia
Julia is the name given to a sound that was picked up by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA) on March 1st, 1999. While the sound has been explained away as a large iceberg in Antarctica, it was loud enough to be clearly heard hundreds of miles away. However, besides the NOAA’s explanation, there is an alternative one that sends chills down the spine. Reportedly, around the same time of the sound, a giant shadow was captured by a NASA satellite off the west coast of South America that was twice the size of the Empire State Building. So, while it would be totally awesome to know that sea monsters secretly exist, the narrative of the sound coming from an iceberg is more comforting.
Tinnitus is when a person hears a sound that appears to have manifested from thin air. It is not a disease, but rather a symptom present in those who have had trauma, illness, or stress that negatively effects their ears. Yet ‘The Mysterious Hum’ or simply ‘The Hum’, is a phenomenon where there are a high volume of reports from concentrated areas of a low frequency humming. These large events mostly affect citizens of the UK and United States – even those who have no reason to have tinnitus. The earliest acknowledgements of The Hum come from the early 1970s, but reports of it still exist, even within the last seven years. Theories ranging from electronics, to widespread outbreak of Tinnitus, to even frequencies from a fish mating call have all been put forth, but nothing has been definitive.
Numbers Stations
In popular espionage movies or television shows, the aspect of secret coding usually comes up at one time or another. When the stakes are high and you need to save the world, but also share information, it simply cannot be passed by normal means. Too often the sharing of secrets is portrayed as the passing of plain envelopes, encrypted letters, or even code words. But, in real life, there are methods that exist for information to be passed to intelligence officers in other countries, primarily through the means of numbers stations. Numbers stations are short wave radio stations that use different phrases or sounds to convey a message that a normal listener wouldn’t understand. While this method was cultivated during World War I, it is still in use today and even has got a couple of people in the United States arrested under the Espionage Act. As recently as 2009, Walter Kendall Myers was charged by the United States with conspiracy because he received coded messages from the Cuban Intelligence Directorate.
